Dublin Core
Title
Description
This painting appears to be a collection of familiar domestic objects: a bowl of fruit and a plant rest upon a deep window sill; another plant is visible outdoors. But is everything in its place? Here, plants on either side of a glass window or glass serving dish point sharply in all directions. Fossil-fueled heat from a radiator is another material connection across the boundaries of inside and outside.
About the Artist: Born in Norfolk, VA, Frank spent her early years in Wyoming because her father was a sheep rancher. Perhaps hyperbolically, she recalled that “The sheep froze, and Indians raided the town. I remember seeing Indians over in the hills” (citation). Her family moved to New York in 1913, where Frank studied at the Cooper Union, the Arts Students League, and privately with Stuart Davis. She was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists (founded 1925). Expressionist. In 1927 she married artist Ralph Mayer, a specialist in painting materials who published The Painter’s Craft. A lot of information on her, some of it biographical. Signs a declaration published in NYT 26 June 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis?) on “the certainty of damage through testing and the imminence of catastrophe through miscalculation. We ask, in the name of our posterity, in the name of the unborn generations and of works yet unborn, that the current tests be stopped, never to be resumed” (p. 1). Her watercolor “Salt” appeared in a 1938 FAP exhibit on Long Island, focused upon farms and rural life; fellow NDG artists Louis Harris, Herman Copen, and Thomas Nagai also appeared. The Brooklyn Museum (1930), 1 work at Index of American Design. 3 more images at FAP.